Monday, 13 December 2010

Wednesday, 8 December 2010

Some palooka(s) made a website called Best of Joburg, and proceeded to award Debonairs the best pizza in town trophy, Steers the equivalent for burgers, and wait for it, Mugg and Bean for coffee!

Now it may be that Famous Brands, which owns all three of these deserved winners, paid for the 'Best' of Joburg site. But the site itself says that these picks are the results of the Readers' Choice Awards of something called Leisure Options, which doesn't seem to produce anything to read.

Anyway, assuming its all legit, as Joburgers are strangely ever-ready to do, this confirms, if confirmation was needed, that Joburg's white middle class is extremely and passionately committed to mainstream living.

Monday, 6 December 2010

SINGAPORE – The latest information dump from WikiLeaks offers fascinating insights into the workings of the US State Department that will keep foreign policy wonks and conspiracy theorists busy for months. Much of what has been reported is not “news” in the traditional sense, of course, but a series of embarrassing gaffes: truths that were never meant to be said aloud.
Underlying these various, and often banal, tidbits of information – it should be no surprise that Americans found Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi “vain,” or regarded Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe as a “crazy old man” – is the larger question of whether governments should be able to keep secrets.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange argues that the answer is no, and that greater transparency “creates a better society for all people.” This raises the question of why governments keep secrets at all, and whether those reasons are justified.
The task of keeping a state’s secrets frequently falls to its intelligence services, which tend to focus on the protection of three types of information.
The first type is their own sources and methods, which need to be safeguarded if they are to remain effective when gathering data. When the Washington Times reported in 1998 that the National Security Agency was able to monitor Osama bin Laden’s satellite phone, for example, he stopped using it.
Second, the identities and activities of a service’s operational staff should be withheld, so that they can do their jobs and to ensure their safety. Following WikiLeaks’ release in July of tens of thousands of documents on the Afghan war, a Taliban spokesman told British journalists that the group was “studying the report” with a view to identifying and punishing anyone found to have collaborated with US forces.
Third, information provided in confidence by foreign governments or intelligence services must be closely held to avoid embarrassing the provider of the information and thereby reducing the likelihood that information will be shared in future. A lasting consequence of the most recent leak is circumspection when sharing intelligence with the United States.
In reality, of course, governments typically attempt to keep much more than this secret. Avoiding embarrassment may at times be in the national interest, but it can also protect the careers of politicians and bureaucrats. In other circumstances, it may be prudent to avoid revealing how much – or how little – is known about a given situation.
WikiLeaks sees itself as part of the tradition in which the media hold governments accountable for abuse. The role of the Fourth Estate was particularly important during the administration of President George W Bush. Revelations of torture, extraordinary rendition, and warrantless electronic surveillance all depended on investigative journalism of a kind that is now threatened by budget cuts and the media’s relentless focus on whatever is current – often at the expense of what is genuinely newsworthy.
But, whereas true investigative journalism depends on quality, WikiLeaks distinguishes itself by quantity. The sheer volume of the data being dumped on the Internet makes it impossible for thorough analysis or, indeed, for thorough examination of potentially damaging information.
The threshold for exposure is no longer wrongdoing of the scale that coined the term “Watergate” and all the subsequent “-gates.” Instead, government officials are being warned that every document may potentially be leaked and published worldwide by a disgruntled junior officer.
The consequence is unlikely to be transparency. Perversely, it will lead to greater secrecy. The message that is almost certainly going through every major power is: be careful what you commit to writing.
In place of candid assessments and provocative analysis, many important decisions will now be based on oral briefings and meetings that are not recorded in minutes. Decision-makers will be wary of openness even with their closest staff.
These changes are likely to outlast US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s embarrassment. Such self-censorship will lead to worse decisions and less accountability for the decisions that are made. It seems a high price to pay for gossip.

Simon Chesterman is Vice Dean and Professor of Law at the National University of Singapore, and Global Professor and Director of the New York University School of Law Singapore Programme. His book One Nation Under Surveillance: A New Social Contract to Defend Freedom Without Sacrificing Liberty will be published in 2011.

Philip Stephens of the FT (courtesy Business Day) has the best take on the latest Wikileaks 'cables' debate. His punchline, for me anyway, is that having this information in the public domain will a) bruise some egos but not make international politics any harder or easier, and b) should knock some foreign policy moralisers, idealists, and activists off their high horses, for a little while at least.

Precipitation from three winter storms during December, 2005; November, 2006; and October, 2008 in Yellowstone National Park was simulated with the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) mesoscale weather model called WRF (Weather Research and Forecasting model). The sea-surface temperature of the Paciﬁc Ocean upwind of the western United States was prescribed with six different ﬁxed temperatures and the resulting simulated precipitation compared to the actual storm precipitation. Sea-surface temperatures over 30°C (86°F) increased the precipitation above normal by as much as a factor of four. Based on the likely four-fold increase in precipitation rate and doubling of the frequency of storms following the Genesis Flood, glaciers over a kilometer (3,300 ft.) thick would have developed in a few hundred years

Friday, 12 November 2010

General: Minister’s racist judiciary claims shot down
The accuracy of a second statement by Deputy Police Minister Maggie Sotyu in support of her argument that the judiciary is racist has been challenged. Sotyu was quoted this week as saying: ‘it is a fact that the judiciary is not transformed. The whites are still the majority (on the Bench).’ A Volksblad report notes that statistics provided by the Department of Justice and the Magistrates’ Commission show that her claim is not true. In 2009, 45% of the country’s judges were white, while 43% of magistrates were white. Sotyu caused a storm this week when she claimed white criminals get lighter sentences. It later turned out that one of the cases she used as an example to illustrate her point had not yet been finalised.Full Volksblad report

Wednesday, 10 November 2010

Justice system racist – Minister
The criminal justice system is racist and needs to be transformed urgently, according to newly-appointed Deputy Police Minister Maggie Sotyu, who pointed out that our courts issue lighter sentences to white criminals. According to a Beeld report, she raised the issue after a parliamentary presentation by the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation (CSVR) on violent crimes. Sotyu said ‘a white person or boer who drags a black farm worker behind his bakkie gets away with a fine of R10 000’, but that ‘a black man who murders a white farmer gets life imprisonment’. ‘It is racist politics,’ she concluded. ‘It is about time that our courts realise it is now the new SA.’Full Beeld report

South Gauteng High Court ‘creaking to a halt’
Prominent Judge Kathy Satchwell has warned that the South Gauteng High Court was slowly ‘creaking to a halt’ due to bad management. ‘No one with any experience of this High Court can dispute that the entire system has been creaking to a halt over the last few years,’ Satchwell says in a letter to Business Day published yesterday. A Mail & Guardian Online report notes that she added that justice spokesperson Tlali Tlali appeared to have ‘no real knowledge’ of the state of affairs at the court. Satchwell was responding to Tlali being quoted in The Sunday Independent newspaper as describing criticism by Judge Neels Claassen as ‘glaringly false’. This was after Claassen, who is the chairperson of the library committee, accused the government of ‘losing its moral high ground by projecting an attitude that the courts are the enemy’. Claassen has complained more than once about the state of the court library. In her letter, Satchwell said the allegations against Claassen were ‘neither accurate, true, nor well-founded’. ‘I am qualified to comment,’ she wrote, stating that the library was in bad condition, the cleaning was inadequate, as was air-conditioning in courtrooms. She added that the toilets were unuseable and files regularly went missing from court.Full Mail & Guardian Online report

Tuesday, 9 November 2010

Did something this eve I have not done for ages - looked at some SAFA news websites. I find some morbid pleasure in reading the comments people leave on articles and things (in particular the subsequent media furore - M&G and more - surrounding the Gareth Cliff "Letter to Government") were a little scary at times. But then I found this. And while many of you have probably already read it, I just wanted to share it. Cause in a very sentimental but serious way, I found it inspiring and the commentary exciting.

Monday, 8 November 2010

Sirius. I don't know if you get them in SA, but Australia (Sydney in particular) is awash with ill-informed tossers following the professional reviewers to all the new restaurants and eating what the reviewer had, giving the same review as the reviewer, and patting themselves on the back for having their finger on the pulse, all the while jerking each other off as they breathlessly recount how they saw Tetsuya at the organic market on the weekend, and HE WAS EATING A BACON AND EGG ROLL!!OMG! Was it organic? Bacon and egg rolls are SO HOT RIGHT NOW! Organic bacon made from pork belly is the new bacon! O-M-FUCKING-G! Its like the fucking Life of Brian, but in real life.

And you know what pisses me off the most? It's the stupid pictures they take. Get a really fast lens, say f1.4, preferably a macro CHECK! Get a digital SLR (number of cool features doesn't matter, only use aperture priority) CHECK! Only shoot with lens wide open, 0.005mm depth of field, focus in on a single piece of micro-cress with rest of restaurant blurry in the background CHECK! Marvel at the cool 'bokeh' from the shitty canon slr lens that came free with the camera. CHECK! Send shout-outs to 'sister-blogger' (most of the bloggers are women, or very camp gay asian men) in Singapore when you have a tasty roti at Mamak CHECK!

Fuck, it does my head in. If you think I'm blowing it out of proportion, just check it...

I belong to a craft circle, much to Franci's dismay. But we make shit, drink tea and chat about life once a week. Clearly we are trend setters as Amy Sedaris has just written a whole book on crafting. I have now come to the realization that our craft circle is so much fun because we are often high on glue, but no one has complained so far.

P.S. Since the blog is dying and no one even reads posts let alone writes them I don't care if you have no interest in crafting. The sad fact is that we are about to surpass the October post total of 4 and it is only the 3rd of November!